The Ocean Sound monitoring sub-system for the Italian Integrated Environmental Research Infrastructures System (ITINERIS) project

The aim of the Italian Integrated Environmental Research Infrastructures System (ITINERIS) project, funded under the Italian Piano Nazionale Resistenza e Resilienza (PNRR) programme, is to establish the Italian Hub of Research Infrastructures within the environmental scientific do- main. ITINERIS will create a flexible system to collect and store, for the first time in a national integrated system, ocean data and metadata and make them available, traceable, accessible, in- teroperable, and reusable for the entire scientific community (FAIR principles). In this context, the Laboratori Nazionali del Sud (LNS) from the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN) coordinates the design and operation of a new underwater Junction Box (JB) to be installed at the infrastructure of Portopalo di Capo Passero, Sicily - Italy, at a depth of about 3450 m. LNS has already designed and successfully operates a network of 3 prototype JBs at 3450 meters. Each of them is capable of interfacing more than 10 observatories to shore. Each JB also host acoustic sensors so that a phased array like this on the seafloor can be built to efficiently store, collect, and analyse acoustic data almost in real-time. This network of acoustic sensors are mainly used for acoustic monitoring (bioacoustics, geophysics and ship noise monitoring). Data can be also used to complement the positioning system of the KM3NeT Neutrino telescope and to carry-on studies for acoustic neutrino detection. In this contribution, an overview on the JB acoustic section and on the hydrophone data acquisition and analysis chain will be provided, by focusing in particular on the novel acoustic data fairness paradigm. Preliminary results on marine noise analysis will be also presented.